


our endless numbered days

by forsanethaec



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Cambridge, College, M/M, Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 14:27:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/419927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It feels good in the summer, a comfort, somehow, when there is nothing to do and no one to be around except each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our endless numbered days

**Author's Note:**

> a little staying on campus over the summer story, because i'm doing that right now in boston too and everything i touch turns into fanfiction. title from iron & wine's "passing afternoon."

Cambridge is weirdly quiet in the summer, thinned out and empty. The days are long and the city rumbles along outside without the students to make it anything more than a happy backdrop. It’ll be hot soon, but for now the weather is just unreasonably perfect, so perfect that it almost feels like a trap, and it’s hard to ever be too far from content. Not that Mark still can’t spend days at a time inside – just that he feels maybe one iota worse about it when he does, with the fresh air pressing patient and tireless at the windows and Eduardo’s quiet, bemused chidings. 

Eduardo clucks around him all soft and sun-warmed in the late mornings, tidying Mark’s cluttered summer single and talking him into breakfast and dragging him out into the Yard to go do nothing there. Mark never puts up much of a fight. Eduardo is here for a summer class; Mark is here for no real reason at all, other than his scholarship would pay for summer housing and Eduardo was going to be here and so he just stayed. He’s working on CourseMatch, a little, in bursts that can last days at a time before Eduardo comes and butts in gently and makes him go outside. 

Mark hadn’t quite realized what he was signing up for, becoming friends just by a sort of happenstance with this unfurled nerve of a person, all his emotions and that incomprehensible fondness he so clearly and unfailingly has for Mark. But it feels good in the summer, a comfort, somehow, when there is nothing to do and no one to be around except each other.

The best thing about summer, actually, is that Eduardo can’t wear suits all the time. It’s so amusingly refreshing to see him in a V-neck and sandals, his spindly toes curling over the worn brown leather into the grass. It’s a Friday afternoon, no one else anywhere, too early to drink and a little muzzy from so many days of negligible activity. There’s a carton of blackberries open between them and the tips of Mark’s fingers are stained ink-purple. He lies back, feeling the grass itch restlessly beneath him like a reminder that he’s alive, that he is here. They aren’t really talking because there is nothing to talk about. The silence is honestly lovely. There could not possibly be less going on and it’s oddly pleasant.

“Do you have your class?” he asks Eduardo, at length. His voice sits strange in his mouth, out of use. He’s feeling low, sort of, a tiny bit off, outside himself. But that’s not uncommon these past few weeks, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, either.

“It’s Tuesday-Thursday,” Eduardo says. Mark can see him shifting out of the corner of his eye. “Are you going anywhere this summer?”

“Might go home for my mom’s birthday in July,” Mark says. “But – no.”

“Cool.” Eduardo comes into Mark’s space then, scooting over on the grass and lying down next to him so that there’s just a parenthetical little stripe of contact, shoulder to elbow, between them. Mark lets it happen. He actually smiles, a little. Summer makes him feel funny. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” Eduardo says. “I’m glad someone’s here. It’s – this is – nice.” 

“Boring,” Mark comments amiably by way of addition. “Not you, I mean, just summer. Summer’s boring.”

“Good boring,” Eduardo says. He nudges himself closer into Mark for a second. It’s really nice. Mark doesn’t mind admitting that to himself, observationally, like an affable shrug. 

A plane flies over, low and loud, heading to Logan up the river. Mark imagines the little picture they make down here. A half pinwheel splayed out against the sea of green, careless and studied at the same time, a miniscule acute angle of two boys all hushed in by old bricks and warm air and a gauzy breeze. 

Mark likes having time to think things that don’t matter, things that move at a gentler speed. Summer doesn’t become caffeine and insomnia and coding sprees quite right. This is a good thing. And there’s Eduardo, too. Summer becomes Eduardo more than anything. 

The nights are stranger, because it’s still just them, just the two of them, constantly. Everyone else is gone, and the few people still on campus who they do know are people they can’t bring themselves to text looking for plans, in the end, not when their first option is just each other. At night it stays perfect out, and they keep the windows wide open and get drunk on cheap beer and watch TV together and don’t feel any of the self-pity they feel during the year when they hermit like this. 

Mark wonders how they can possibly keep this up for a whole three months. He loves the idea of the challenge. 

Eduardo gets cuddly when he’s drunk. He’s really just a handsy person, Mark’s noticed. It’s showing a little more now that there’s nobody around – in the preceding year, Mark’s freshman year and their first knowing each other, it had been a little more restrained, because the company was always mixed, the rooms always crowded and boisterous. This, now, could not possibly be less crowded or less boisterous, and it’s refreshing. 

SportsCenter is on, but Eduardo has been asleep for a while, kind of half on Mark, sprawled against his chest and taking up more than his fair share of the couch. Mark’s pleasantly drunk, liquid and careless. He’s not paying attention to the movie, but he doesn’t know what he _is_ doing, until Eduardo stirs against him and he realizes that he had been thinking about Eduardo, actually, this warm closeness, inconsequential and curious. 

Eduardo turns into him, surfacing out of sleep, sniffing, and says, “Hey,” all easy and exposed, voice slow with drowsiness and beer, blinking his heavy lashes at Mark, and Mark puts his hand on Eduardo’s arm where it rests between them, brain disconnected from body by drinking and not really paying much attention on its own either. Eduardo looks down at the point of contact, and then Mark leans over and kisses him, entirely without thought, just because he wants to. 

Eduardo’s hand comes up to side of his jaw after a moment, like it takes a beat for this to become real, and it’s slow and long and easy, languid, slight. 

When they break apart, Mark says, “Summer,” pointlessly, the soft, quick syllables more breathless than he thought they’d be. His body thrums. Eduardo is pink-cheeked and he smiles open-mouthed, a marveling smile, a smile that for one fleeting moment Mark understands is about _him_ , and that’s bizarre. 

They’re the only people they know here. It’s June, and they’re young, and it’s just them. He kisses Eduardo again, and he really likes it and he loves being drunk because it’s making him physically incapable of thinking anything about this beyond that he doesn’t care and it’s so fantastic that Eduardo’s here and he’s letting Mark kiss him because that’s so nice, it’s perfect, Mark can’t believe they’ve wasted a year not doing this when it’s this nice. There’s nothing hurried about it; _summer_ , he thinks. They’re on island time.

Eduardo says against his mouth, “Come to bed with me,” and he’s drunk too and he dissolves into laughter, hiding his face, and Mark grins.

“It’s my bed, dumbass,” he says, “we’re in my room,” but he lets himself be led anyway, when Eduardo pulls it together, romantic like a joke and seamlessly uncomplicated. 

It’s morning, both of them half-clothed and curled together, when it takes a little shape: when Eduardo wakes him with a kiss and a ridiculously shy smile and hopeful, questioning eyes and Mark isn’t even that hungover and he just kisses Eduardo back, because it seems like the most obvious choice, really a no-brainer, to want to kiss Eduardo. And he registers, belatedly, that this is continuing to happen in sober daylight and he feels approximately the same way about it as he had last night. Somehow, it’s comfortable. It settles into the bed and their skin and the space between them, the cotton-worn carelessness that the season blankets over the whole campus, as though it belongs there utterly, a component part. Mark’s glad Eduardo’s here. He thinks all this sun-drenched possibility would fit him strangely on its own, would itch. Eduardo’s a good bridge, like he often is, a snug sort of prosthetic. 

Summer makes Mark lazy about caring, not detached but more complacent, easily contented and too much so to want to complicate anything. Things just are, and it feels like they’ll disappear when the fall comes, like a dream on waking. But the fall is a long time away, and right now Eduardo’s here, so this is where Mark wants to be, too.


End file.
